New and Uncollected Poems
Contents:
1. A Letter from Africa
2. Cricket at the Mental
3. Branch
4. Far and High
5. Diversions
6. Teaching the poet to swim.
7. 3 Found Poems (A day in the life.)
8. For Derek Walcott
9. Sometimes one is so terribly English.
10. 'Blue Soap' (sculptures by Stanley Greaves)
11. The Road to El Dorado [soon come...]
12. Getting a Buzz out of Life: a surrealist comedy
13. Burning
14. Stranger
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1.
A Letter from Africa
My indeed one,
Salutation to you!
I am not meant to embarras you in any way please,
but it is to bring to you, of what is very important
and in need to me concerning my state of life.
Before unfolding this to you, I will like
to introduce myself to you. I am a single child,
now an orphan as a result of what war
has caused in our country and there after.
My name is Stella festus. I am from Ivory Coast
in west part of Africa. I am still single woman
of 23 years old. I hereby solicit for your trust
and co_operation to handle certain sum of fund
my parents left in the custody of a banker
in our country. If you are interested, willing
and ready, you send me forth for details,
I awaits your response fast.
Yours truely,
Miss Stella
(Unpublished)
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2.
Cricket at The Mental
For Gareth Jenkins
Looking down from Mynydd Troed
the roofs of the asylum glint and glitter
like the portals of some legendary city,
and even climbing up the hill from Sanity
the grey-blue mansion perched
between Black Mountains and the green
lush gardens of the Wye seems idylic,
a retreat to envy the sad or mad or hopeless,
condemned to spend their lives in there.
We come here every weekend to play cricket,
village boys and incomers, farmers, teachers,
policemen and preachers, a few docs
and nurses too; we are, and take, a therapy,
an entertainment for the inmates
on the broken rustic seats. We shuck
our ordinary selves for this event,
become alike as prisoners or patients
in our clean, pressed uniforms
and wait the wise men in white coats
who'll judge, "beyond any reasonable doubt"
who stays in and who goes out.
II
The man at deep square leg (his back turned
on The Mental) has the best views
in all of Breconshire, could write a treatise
on the cloud formations and the ways
the wind drives weather from the west
and the shadows and the glare and the rainbows
and the small lives going on down there
in the valleys and farms, along the roads
winding to horizons in God knows where…
it is no wonder if he gets distracted,
has to be called back into the game by
someone fielding on the off, concentrating,
determined not to glance above the ritual
measured dance that is the game
into The Mental. It’s not so much that he
believes the stories, or is afraid – the place
is sanctuary after all, a site of healing –
but it’s the way, somehow, it steals the light
and makes you pause, just for a second,
to ask yourself some ridiculous question
like ‘who am I?’ ‘What am I doing here?’
‘What can be the purpose of all this striving?’
as if the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’
weren’t obvious, like that clear white line
he’s meant to be defending. “Just for a second
mind, don’t get me wrong…” Always
the game’s just going on, and he will try again
to focus his attention on the bat and ball
and join in that loud chorus asking nothing
more profound, more meaningful
than, “How was that? How was that umpire?”
(Published in WASAFIRI)
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3.
Branch
For Olive (who couldn’t pronounce anemones)
Down all the small islands
old people call their poets ‘turn-tongue’,
which is to say they mek up stories too bad,
which is to say you kyaan believe
a damn word them fellas does say,
unless nasberry taste like turpentine-mango
or sour-sop punch like bwoile hog-plum.
But whatever it was I said, I didn’t mean it.
So you may take this peace offering
with a pinch of salt, Olive,
’though one turn-tongue to another
should make for straight talking…
Not that there is really any peace
to make; a little teasing now and then
is treasured by the wisest men,
as ev’ry Jama woman surely knows.
And whatever it was I said, I didn’t mean it.
But still, I hear you studyin revenge,
An you the seventh daughter
of a seventh child, (or some such
blasted foolishness) so me na fool wi dat!
An I say sarry, Olive, sarry gal,
for whatever it was I said, I didn’t mean it.
Come, take this bowl of bright anemones
in Peace an Love: Walk good,
Olive darlin, walk good.
(Published in WASAFIRI)
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4.
Far and High
For Amryl Johnson
It’s not so much the cunny, querrelous voice
“You fish fresh” of ‘Granny in de Market Place’
that’s most impressed in memory’s soft tissue,
nor even her adolescent gran-pickney,
‘Midnight without Pity’, a cut-glass calypsonian
black an bold and beautiful, chanting down Babylon
and the patronising patronage of literary London,
nor even the mellower, shape shifting warner woman
that she became, the fabulous Gorgan,
crying curses and charms over a foolish world.
Rather it’s that moment when,
on a dank November afternoon in Birmingham,
the room half filled with reluctant students
and two or three salaried, literary hacks,
(dutiful specialists in feminist this and post-colonial that)
when Amryl broke into ‘Far and High’
her poem-song celebration of sisterly blood and wine,
dancing with demons, an ecstatic reaching for the sky,
and in that electric moment the room transmogrified,
was suddenly dread and desire, womb and war
Elmina and El Dorado….
some place those students had never been before
and would rarely reach again, became a shiver
that the hacks could never touch or de-construct
or explain or cut its throat to count the bones of,
that allowed us, for that moment, far and high,
to move inside the dream.
(Published in WASAFIRI)
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5.
Diversions
For Archie Markham
All roads on small islands meander.
It’s a way of cheating the claustrophobia,
extending the journey from Here to There
when those two fickle destinations
are so much alike that without the hop-an-drop,
the wine-an-grine of getting there,
there’d be no reason to travel at all.
This is not a philosophy the continentals -
the peoples of Empire - could ever understand.
The Romans would have hated it,
why make those unnecessary diversions
those kinks and curves, quirky excursions
when you can drive it straight and true?
True indeed, but as every jackass knows
the bald, unvarnished, plain and simple,
no ifs ands or nothing but the truth
is always an illusion, a deceit, an angle,
to say it plain, a lie. Who does not need to paint
the background in, explain how it and she
and there and now and he and then and here
are somehow linked, though not so neatly
you could ever draw a map except the lines
that bind them all would twist and bend
and curl back over, as if you teased out
the strands of a story like spaghetti
and dumped them on a plate, just like the Romans
make it. But which of them would eat
spaghetti without its sauce, to spice it up,
provide a little flavour for their plain
and honest staple? For as one of the boys
once said, “You always carrying the island
in your head, the road you on is always
somewhere ‘twix Back-a-Bush and Down Along,”
meandering like this poem, going nowhere,
coming back to praise the quirky traveller’s tales
of this urbane, restless, small-island man.
(Published in WASAFIRI)
(A version of this poem appears in the feschrift volume for E.A. Markham, Living in Disguise (1999))
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6.
Teaching the Poet to Swim
For Niyi Osundare
I
My friend does me great honour,
when we meet he hails me, ‘Coach’
talks fantasies of swimming to far countries,
of racing with sharks and conversing with Leviathan.
Listening, you’d think we’d won some
cross-channel relay marathon at least.
The truth is better really,
my friend, a strong man in his fifties,
an African, distinguished, dignified,
splashing and flapping the ten wide yards
from him to me, at our shoulders’ depth,
in the Caribbean sea, off Paradise, Barbados.
His eyes are as wide with terror and distrust,
cursing the damn fool Englishman
who tricked him into this charade
of push and pull and kick and breathe,
“remember the rhythm Niyi, relax…”
But he’s determined to prove that
‘you’ll never do it it’ sneer he knows
he hears behind the patronising banter,
WRONG.
And eventually he does.
To much wahalla and delight all round.
So what’s the story?
Why all this arty song and dance
About a poet doing breast-stroke at the beach?
II
Back then, in that far distant life
of mysteries and patient laughter,
the wise-heads of the village once decreed
that he
– a favourite Of Osun, the jealous river goddess –
should never venture far from shore
lest she should snatch him back,
should wrap him in a shroud of wrack
and hold him to his promise…
All that was more than half a life ago
but – farmer born, peasant bred –
those deep ancestral roots still hold his feet firm
on the broken ground
no matter how the wide world sings his praises.
He long ago abandoned his machete
and his mattock for the lectern and the pen,
honing his wit on the turmoil of his times
to cultivate a different crop, in rhymes.
And yet, this worldly wise professor,
a Doctor of philosophy, of arts and sciences,
eschewing superstition and all flim-flam fakery,
still breaks out in a sweat each time
he has to cross dark water –
on a bridge, worse in a boat
or even flying First Class at thirty thousand feet.
Reservoirs make him nervous, waterfalls are taboo,
and he’s never even paddled past his ankles in the sea.
So you may understand the honour,
the responsibility,
of trying to teach this poet how to swim.
(Published in POUI)
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7.
Three found e-poems (‘a day in the life’)
For Katie Gramitch
1.
Announcement
History of Medicine and Health Research Seminar
The seminar
has been cancelled
owing to the illness
of the speaker.
………………………………..
2.
From: The University of Birmingham
To: Academic Staff
Date sent: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 11:14:55
Subject: Cancellation of War and Society
Priority: normal
………………………………………
3.
LOGIN – 4.21. 15890:
Your current context is ARTS.BHAM
Your current tree is: BHAM
Staff user
User BrownS
Good Morning
Welcome to the Novell Network
The specified user does not exist….
(unpublished)
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8.
For Derek Walcott
Introduced at a party, I want to say
“Sir, I try to be a poet, too,
I carry your verses everywhere,
they pulse for me like fireflies on a moonless night.”
But instead I mumble my credentials,
say, "I wrote a thesis on your work…"
watch your eyes glaze over as we shake hands,
and you fade back, quick, into the crowd.
(unpublished)
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9.
Sometimes one is so terribly English.
Despite the laid back, worldly wise façade,
the demotic drawl, the classless curse,
a few words of the local lingo
to confirm his difference from the rest
of those pink, perspiring, portly
look-a-likes, when push comes to shove
and the chips are down, don’t you know,
the voiceprint of authentic Englishness
dares to speak its name…
Like last time
in Lagos airport, the usual scam,
the solicitous man who offers
to get your bags checked through, let you
avoid the queues, avoid the fate of those
– inevitably - bounced from this flight
because the plane is overbooked
(he even has a mate in uniform
who will confirm that yesterday
so many, many folk were turned away…)
Now hear the pukka Englishman...
“and will there be a charge for this service?”
(unpublished)
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10.
'Blue Soap' (sculptures by Stanley Greaves)
(2 versions – one in the Barbados Art Foundation Collection, a variant in a private collection )
They are alike but different,
these brothers, Caribbean
Moai, the watchers
inscrutable guardians
of a grave secret.
Pay attention to their boots,
their sinister armaments.
They do not smile
but neither do they sneer,
they are indifferent
to the juk and wyynd
of passing carnival:
aloof, all seeing, blind.
Each offers you a tablet
of blue soap: a sign,
a token of intent.
How will you read this?
Is it a treasure or a curse,
talisman or detonator?
Is this a test? A game?
Which brother will you choose?
What will you offer in exchange?
Be cautious. Be afraid,
For these are the watchers,
guardians of dark places
all must travel, soon or late.
(A version published in The Zemicon gallery catalogue to the exhibition ' Words on Paintings')
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11.
The Road to El Dorado
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12.
Getting a Buzz Out of Life: a surrealist comedy
In the ornamental gardens
at the Falmouth School of Art
tropical species flounce their brash
exotic plumage alongside
dowdy English blooms, whose
hardiness proves no virtue
in this sunny Cornish clime.
I lift hibiscus to my face
for the intoxication in it...
Ah! rum and memory...
but the bush breaks into song!
What, some musical hybrid
from the Orient? No,
the happy bee, like a fat painter,
flies out of purple into green,
humming as he works
for the ecstasy in it,
rolling into the pots of pigment
and wildly daubing the bright
gardens with his fur's soft filbert.
And here the music master,
(just back from rugby by his shirt)
hums Bizet as he strides
to make rehearsals,
while the famous poet - round,
bewhiskered, of honeyed
tooth and tongue - strolls blearily
from the canteen, intoning OMMMM....
for a moment their paths meet,
these distracted artists,
the air suddenly alive
with Elysian song that echoes
around the shimmering gardens
returning as soft thunder
to the spot, where, months later,
blooms a perfumed, rare,
kaleidescopic, rose.
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13.
Burning
Electricity fails. Candlelight and a moth flies greedy to the flame, glows translucent amber as it burns. I hesitate, but let it.
Monstrous, with its rump in molten wax, a crumpled wing becoming fire, it’s better off a cinder than eaten half alive by lizard or ants.
Would, when I’m half dead, someone lets me burn out in sudden flame: rather that scream into darkness than dimming lights that won’t come up again.
(Sunday Gleaner, Jamaica)
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14.
Stranger
To small children on the street I am a stranger: their mothers have told them not to talk to people like me.
I am one of the unnumbered millions, we meet in the street but do not speak. We are strangers to each other.
I am the boy next door, the face in the crowd, the man in the street, the public at large.
I am too small to be important but too big to be ignored. I am the drunk escaping from the pub
and the man crying on a railway platform, I am your forgotten friends and the quiet ones you never noticed.
I sit next to you on buses and speak to you in mistaken phone calls, I am a number in your accounts
and a name in your directory – Jane Doe, Joe Blow, A.N. Other. I will not scream at you
or attack you in the park, but I am not afraid of you. There is little I can lose.
To small children on the street I am a stranger, their mothers have told them not to talk to people like me.
(Published in Outposts)